looked that night as a Norman peasant girl. It was all very well for
Cyril Carey to condescend to the deceit of praising Annie and Dora up to
the skies, when everybody knew whom he admired most, with reason. That
was Fanny Russell, with her splendid black eyes and hair, and the Norman
strength and fineness of her profile.

What was Nurse Annie, in her holland gown, apron, and cap, recalling and
revelling in? The silly vanities and child's play of the past. Well,
what harm was there in them? These had been blithe moments while they
lasted, which had set young hearts bounding, young feet skipping, and
young voices laughing and singing in a manner which was natural, and not
to be forbidden lest worse came of it.

Annie was roused from her pleasant reverie and plunged into another of
a totally different description. The last was made up of garbled
reality, but with what truth was in it tending to a false, doleful
vision. It would represent St. Ebbe's as a gloomy, ghastly prison-house
of suffering and death, and she in her tender youth and sweet beauty
immured in it by an error of judgment, a fatal mistake incidental to
rash enthusiasm and total inexperience. If Annie ever arrived at that
rueful conclusion, how could she bear the penalty she must pay?

Annie had heard and read of young women on whom the world did not cry
shame, who turned from the decay and death they had not gone to seek,
which Providence had brought to their doors, in paroxysms of repugnance
and rebellion. They could not bear that their perfection of health and
life should come into contact with something so chillingly, gruesomely
different, that their glowing youth should be wasted in the dim shadows
of sick-rooms or amidst the dank vapours hovering over the dark river
which all must ford when their time comes. Those standing round who
heard or read the outcry called it natural, piteous, well-nigh
praiseworthy, it was so sincere. How could Annie realize for herself in
a moment that such heroines(!) are the daughters in spirit of the women
who, in outbreaks of mediaeval pestilence and latter-day cholera, have
literally abandoned their nearest and dearest, fleeing from spectacles
of anguish and risks of infection? How could she guess that such women
are the spiritual sisters of poor heathen and savage Hottentot and Malay
mothers and daughters, who, sooner than be burdened with the wailing
helplessness of infancy and the mumbling fatuity of age, will expos